When sending cold emails or sales-focused LinkedIn messages, it’s easy to have your messages viewed as SPAM.

That’s because many sales reps, agency owners, and entrepreneurs still blast the same, non-personal sales email to thousands of prospects, thinking it will get them leads.

The problem is, they get lost in the inbox, end up in the SPAM folder, or get an angry not-interested reply. It’s just not a good methodology.

Personalized first lines are one-liners used in the beginning of a cold outreach message that comment something specific about the prospect, showing that the sender did their research and this isn’t just another SPAM “mass email”.

It’s a way to stand out in the inbox and increase reply rates by up to 30% (or more depending on different factors!).

If you’re not using personalized first lines in your cold outreach at the moment, I highly suggest you take notes.

For most agencies and sales pros who do use personalized first lines in their cold outreach, there are limited options available to get them done fast & correctly.

The standard is to hire freelancers who go through prospect lists one-by-one, do some research, and write a first line relevant to the prospect.

The problem? It’s slow and expensive!

Some agencies pay up to $0.70 per first line to get quality work.

This is where AI comes in.

Some clever software developers have created apps that personalize first lines using artificial intelligence – just load in your list and click the button.

But, with speed comes other issues.

In the past, AI first lines weren’t outputting the best quality. The first lines sometimes came off robotic and impersonal (the exact opposite of the goal!).

However, in theory, AI is the best way to get personalized first lines done in a quick and inexpensive way.

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from that low quality AI…

As of the writing of this article, there has been a revolution in AI technology for first line writing that has increased the quality.

While it used to pull from limited data points about the prospect (explains the robotic quality), now we’re able to pull from over 5 in-depth data points that actually dive into the prospect’s personal life, the company’s *good* news across the internet, and specific achievements from their website, among others.

This has improved first line quality ten-fold and is creating a win-win situation for sales pros and agencies to scale their outreach (and ROI) without sacrificing relevance and that “personal touch”.

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Technology is moving fast, and if you stay in the “AI doesn’t work” mindset, you’re going to waste a lot of time and a ton of money.

We don’t want to see you go down that road…

I hope this article dispels some myths about AI and personalized first lines that inspire you to give it a try.

‍Pro tip: if you need B2B prospect lists built, rely on ListKit to get hyper-personalized lists delivered to your inbox in 24 hours.